page_title: Verity Lambert
section_title: Early career in independent television
hierarchical_section_title: Verity Lambert / Early career in independent television
caption_attribution_description: Former studios of ABC Weekend TV in Didsbury, Manchester. Pictured whilst called the Capitol Theatre, and in use by Manchester Metropolitan University (formerly Polytechnic) as the training base for their television production course, and home to the Manchester Polytechnic School of Theatre (drama school). Demolished in 1998 to make way for new flats.
context_page_description: Verity Ann Lambert OBE was an English television and film producer.
  Lambert began working in television in the 1950s. She began her career as a producer at the BBC by becoming the founding producer of the science-fiction series Doctor Who from 1963 until 1965. She left the BBC in 1969 and worked for other television companies, notably having a long association with Thames Television and its Euston Films offshoot in the 1970s and 1980s. Her many credits as producer include Adam Adamant Lives!, The Naked Civil Servant, Rock Follies, Minder, Widows, G.B.H., Jonathan Creek, Love Soup and Eldorado. She also worked in the film industry for Thorn EMI Screen Entertainment. From 1985 she ran her own production company, Cinema Verity. She continued to work as a producer until the year she died.
  Women were rarely television producers in Britain at the beginning of Lambert's career. When she was appointed to Doctor Who in 1963, she was BBC Television's only female drama producer, as well as the youngest.
context_section_description: Lambert was born in London, the daughter of a Jewish accountant, and was educated at Roedean School. She left Roedean at sixteen and studied at the Sorbonne in Paris for a year and at a secretarial college in London for eighteen months. She later credited her interest in the structural and characterisational aspects of scriptwriting to an inspirational English teacher. Lambert's first job was the typing of menus at the Kensington De Vere Hotel, which employed her because she had been to France and could speak French. In 1956, she entered the television industry as a secretary at Granada Television's press office. She was sacked from this job after six months.
  Following her dismissal from Granada, Lambert took a job as a shorthand-typist at ABC Television. She soon became the secretary to the company's Head of Drama and then a production secretary working on a programme called State Your Case. She then moved from administration to production, working on drama programming on ABC's popular anthology series Armchair Theatre and also early episodes of The Avengers, both of which were then overseen by the new Head of Drama, Canadian producer Sydney Newman.
  Catastrophic incidents could occur on live television of this era. On 30 November 1958, while Lambert was working as a Production Assistant on Armchair Theatre, an actor died during a broadcast of Underground and she had to take responsibility for directing the cameras from the studio gallery while director Ted Kotcheff worked with the actors on the studio floor to accommodate the loss.
  In 1961, Lambert left ABC, spending a year working as the personal assistant to American television producer David Susskind at the independent production company Talent Associates in New York. Returning to England, she rejoined ABC with an ambition to direct, but remained a production assistant and found it impossible to gain promotion. She decided that, if she could not find advancement within a year, she would abandon television as a career.
caption: ABC Television's studios at Didsbury, Manchester, where Lambert worked in the late 1950s.
exif: {}